Sucker Bets
December 16, 2003
Let’s abolish marriage.
That opened your eyes, eh? Thought it would. No, let’s – as an exercise – abolish marriage. This is day one. Sex is something you do for fun, because it feels good and you have that urge for it. It’s the motivation for procreation! Can I have a hallelujah from the congregation? Amen!
Whoops. We got us a pregnancy. Well, it’s mom’s. The baby, all that – and all the responsibility. Men – no rights. No responsibility. What to do, what to do?
It’s going to suck to be mom. Water weight gain, swelling, morning sickness, getting so you can’t do the day to day things of life. And, looks like you may have to go it alone. You’ve a mom and sisters. If they aren’t too busy with their brood. (Uh! Men are out of the equation! Keep it logically consistent here.)
Maybe you can do a Hillary, and have it take a village. Hm. Trouble is, the damn village is all pregnant, or has brats underfoot. Who’s going to hunt the food, and plow the fields? Can’t count on the men. They’re out wilding about, making a living for themselves, and hooking up with ya’ll whenever. Nothing in it for them. Maybe one or two might want to come in and work for you for some of that old something-something every now and again, if you know what I’m saying. Most, however, aren’t. There’s no stake in it. Brat could be anyone’s.
But you know – those damn men are awfully handy to have around when something needs killing or the heavy work needs to be done, aren’t they? That damn bicycle is looking better and more needful all the time…
(A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, remember? Try to keep up here.)
Let’s look up one of these guys in this alternate reality. Hmm. He looks a lot like me. Handsome devil, isn’t he? Wait, she’s trying to talk him into it – let’s listen…
Hey, I’m hunting and plowing all the damn day, and sharing my food with you when you’re laying down with whatever guy suits your fancy, and taking care of his brat? No, no. Pass. Now, if I could be sure it was mine, and if I could be sure I wouldn’t have to compete with other men for your, ah, favors, I might be interested. Bird in the hand, you know.
Yeah, you’re worried about your kid. Women. I swear. Oh. You also want something else? Now what? Oh. You want to be sure that I won’t be knocking up other women, and sharing my stuff with them and THEIR kids?
Man, there’s always a catch. Okay, I guess that’s only fair. So, let’s get to knocking the headboar… Something else?
What do you mean, how do you know I won’t walk off when you’re past childbearing age? Start another family, and leave you out in the cold with nothing to offer? Would I do…? Okay. Whatever.
Hey! Wait a minute! Long as we’re on the subject, how the heck do I know you’re not going to pick up and walk away with my stuff and my kids a few years down the road? Huh? Some other guy with a bigger farm, or you just getting tired of the same old?
Yes – what?!?!?! Listen! Why you…..!
Stop. Okay. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll make this deal in front of witnesses. And unless one of us breaks the deal, and is at fault, there’s no backing out. If one of us just wants out, well, we walk away with nothing. Break the deal, same thing. Deal?
Good. It’s a deal!
Ladies and Gents, what we’ve seen just created here, no matter what we call it, is the concept of marriage. A meeting of equals, in an agreement of equals, a contract if you will, with consequences for defaulting. This whole concept has held together civilization for millennia. Despite Hillary Clinton’s sniveling to the contrary, there is no culture of any consequence that has used the “village” model. Remove the whole children variable from this model, though, and it falls dead on its prat. Without children, the whole foundation for marriage ceases to exist.
Note carefully. It is structured around reproduction and providing for the future. Love is not mentioned – it’s a bonus, but it has nothing to do with marriage in and of itself. A perfectly strong marriage, raising fine children, can be done with benevolent tolerance of each other even if passion is lacking. It did so for centuries, and still does. A romantic basis for marriage is a relatively recent development, and in many places regarded as a silly basis for it, or at least a frivolous luxury.
Marriage is about children, about raising them for the future. Parents – real parents, at least – often sacrifice transitional happiness and dreams for the sake of having immortality in the form of their children. It’s work. It’s a deal, with rewards of companionship in old age, and children to build home and family around. Break the deal, and you lose all. At least, that’s how it used to be until the Feminazis “fixed” it.
Feminists, their cousins the social progressives, and others of that kind loathe and abhor this whole concept of marriage. For them, it’s about personal fulfillment, and evanescent happiness. Don’t like it? Not “gratified?” Away with it, then. But somehow they seem to be the first to offer up the base canard that those of us who call ourselves “Men’s Activists” hate marriage.
Nothing could be further from the truth. But what we have now in the western world doesn’t really bear any resemblance to the above, does it? We just hate THEIR concept of marriage, which is a total bastardization of the original concept.
Most of this criticism does come from women, particularly besotted young females with their heads full of silly notions. They allow this romantic concept of some Prince Charming to take root, and center marriage around them – their wants. Their desires. Their needs. Them, them, them. Children be damned. Mate be damned, it’s all about them, and if they aren’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Such a concept is short-sighted and selfish in the extreme.
Our deal is a ghost of what it was, and for men it’s a crock. Marriage is one hell of a good deal for women, though. We’re cads if we stray – and if our wives stray, we’re the cads who pushed them to it. We labor in a role that has remained unchanged. Women have “choices.” We’re expected to pick up more and more of their traditional slack as the years go by. They don’t cook, clean, or take our names, we patriarchal sexist oppressors, us. We leave the marriage, we’ve abandoned our families. Women leave, we still lose our families, but we become “Deadbeat Dads” (Even if our support is paid in full – or the we get the “Disneyland Dad” moniker). We leave a child fatherless, and we’re schnooks. Woman leaves a child fatherless and she’s brave and heroic. Single mothers have a ready made sugar daddy to take care of their housing, medical, schooling, food stamps, daycare and all in the form of Fedgov, Inc. You a man? Go to work, slacker. Quit whining. Suck it up. Why didn’t you leave those children with their mother where they belonged, you bastard?
Ever notice that the person who says, “It’s a man’s world” is never a man?
Run the numbers, sometime. Don’t take my word for it. Half of all marriages fail. That’s a point-five. 70% of all marriages are dissolved by women. That’s .5 x .7 which equals .35. 95% of the time she gets the kids, which also means support and infrastructure – in other words, the house, the car, the bank accounts. Don’t worry. You’ll get the debt and legal bills. You aren’t walking away empty handed. What could be fairer?
95% of .35 is .33. That’s a one in three chance of a man losing his ass, and his kids, and being effectively indentured for ten to twenty years. We won’t even go into move away moms and such. And with 30% of all kids at last count being surprises from mommy’s trysts, that makes it one in ten likely that you’ll be doing it for a kid that isn’t even yours.
Go ahead, man. Use your calculator. Don’t take MY word for it. As the great Foghorn Leghorn once said, you can argue with me all you want. Figures don’t lie. You can’t argue with the figures.
One in three. Hell, Russian Roulette is 1 in 6. Even if you massage those numbers optimistically, you still wind up with about a 1 in 4 chance of sweetie-pie kicking your butt out and putting the screws to you. Let’s see, I put one bullet in, so. Close, spin, gun to the temple…
Psych. One in six, though, and I bet you thought me a blooming idiot. But hey, we’re woman hating, anti-family, child loathing Men’s Rights Actvists, eh? So what do we know? Pay no attention to the Feminut Schnauzer behind the curtain. We’re for undermining the family, and are enemies of truth, justice, and the American Way.
GRRRRR! Damn Left-Wing Commie Scum! I’m so ashamed….
Okay. I’m over it. Sorry, guys. I tried real hard to feel guilty, but what can I say?
We’ve all heard about the marriage strike. We’ve got your think tanks, your pundits, your women, your social architects, and all kinds of folk scratching their head and gazing at wonder at this phenomenon. They’re all trying to explain it away, but I will be damned if a one of them has come up with the obvious. I guess it’s too easy for these mental midgets.
Okay. Very slowly. Let me break out the Crayolas. Marriage is a sucker bet. Older guys come from a different era when it meant something. Middle aged guys have been there, done that, fool me twice shame on me. Young guys have watched their older brothers, friends, fathers, uncles, and all other manner of men be put through the wringer. They’ve been raised by single mothers, and heard them chattering away, and tittering over “Sticking it to the bastard” and they want no part of it. Shocking, isn’t it?
Could it be that men are just running the numbers and deciding the risk-reward ratio just ain’t worth it? What a concept!
No, that can’t be it, they say. It has to be something else, they say. Men are just commitmentphobic and immature, they say.
That’s right. You keep telling yourself that. God forbid we look at the real issue, and actually do anything to correct it, though. That just might make sense, and we can’t have that, can we?
